A Cup of Comfort for Writers: Inspirational Stories That Celebrate the Literary Life

Summary

As every writer knows, keeping the faith isn't always easy. On those days when you find yourself literally at a loss for words, you may long for a little writer's TLC. In A Cup of Comfort for Writers, you'll meet more than fifty writers who, just like you, have faced down that empty page and won! From a woman who enters an elite writing program at the age of forty, and proceeds to blow "the pros" away, to a man who wins his wife's hand by writing her countless love letters. Whether you're already published or as yet undiscovered, A Cup of Comfort for Writers will inspire you, motivate you, and fuel the fire that keeps you writing.

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A Cup of Comfort for Writers - Colleen Sell

For Mom, the poet, for inspiring and encouraging my love of language and literature

Contents

Introduction • Colleen Sell

Hummingbird’s Journey • Cassie Premo Steele

Groupie • Lori Maliszewski

Wasting Time • Lauren Kessler

Why Write? • Camille Moffatt

To Begin • Kathryn Magendie

The Zen of Rejection • Sally Bellerose

Thomas Wolfe Wasn’t Kidding • Stacey Donovan

The Day I Turned Scarlett • Kathleen Gerard

About My Promise to My Mother • Allison Maher

Memoirs of a Shiksa • Christina Hamlett

We Are Mortified by You • Stephanie Losee

A New Point of View • Samantha Ducloux Waltz

Of Rewrites and Restitution • Karen McQuestion

Me, an Artist • Meridian James

Falling in Love Again • Paula Munier

The Writer Who Couldn’t Read • Chris J. Markham

Potty Talk • Marla Doherty

Something to Say • Mimi Greenwood Knight

The Drowning Girl • Kathy Briccetti

Jump • Jan Henrikson

Of Trifles and Truffles • Carol McAdoo Rehme

The Queen of Procrastination • Diana Jordan

Learning to Listen • Peggy Duffy

Reading by Flashlight, Writing by Heart • Cynthia Ruchti

23½ Love Letters • George Weinstein

Raw Material • Valerie Schultz

Lament of the Aspiring Writer • Brenda Kezar

On Unconditional Love and Rejection Slips • Pat Gallant

The Voice in My Head • Gila Zalon

Writing without Pizza • Felice Prager

The Inklets • Ava Pennington

Flow • Sage Cohen

The Big Hiatus • Denise R. Graham

Out of the Fog • Becky Mushko

The Echolalia of Literature • Phyllis Ann Mannan

Addiction • Alaina Smith

Heritage of Words • Amy Rose Davis

Nonfiction Nightmares • Ellen Dworsky

The Baptism • Marian Van Eyk McCain

I Remember Anna • Lisa Romeo

Talking on Paper • Alarie Tennille

Bountiful Hunger • Jana Harris

Confessing in 5,000 Steps • Roberta Beach Jacobson

Time Enough • Lorri McDole

The Write Mother • Judy L. Adourian

The Only Cure for the No-News Blues • Valetta Smith

Charity Begins at My Keyboard • Harriet Cooper

The Greatest Gig on Earth • Amy A. Mullis

Out of Dry Ground • Kathryn Presley

The Deal • Susan Mayer Davis

What Makes Me Whole • Amy S. Mercer

The Truth about Lies • Jenny Rough

Contributors

About the Editor

Acknowledgments

Introduction

"I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live."

~ Françoise Sagan

Like most writers, I did not become a writer. I simply am a writer. Always have been, always will be. I write because I cannot not write. And when I go too long with too little writing, I feel off, out of sorts, surly, and anxious and sad. Yet, even when I do not record them, even when I stifle them and shoo them away — Not now, I’m too tired, too busy, too distracted with work, with life — the stories come, refusing to be shushed. And eventually, I listen; I let the words, the stories out; I write. I must.

Still, it took a while for me to realize that writing is not just something I do; it is an essential part of who I am. It took even longer to reconcile my writing life with the rest of my life. How can I be a writer and a wife, mother, grandmother, daughter, granddaughter, sister, aunt, in-law, friend, employee, businesswoman, housekeeper, gardener, dancer, hiker, singer, activist? I often wondered. Sometimes, it did not seem possible. Sometimes, it seemed I would have to choose: writing or a normal life. Sometimes, I felt like an alien in my own life… . Until I connected with other writers. Until I found my tribe.

What I found, through my communion with other writers, is that the writer’s life is about living and writing. It’s not either/or. It’s not even about striking a balance between writing and living. It’s about combining writing with living in order to be whole. Of course, that is easier said than done. That’s why we, the odd assortment of writers who make up the venerable tribe of storytellers, must help one another find and sustain that holistic equilibrium.

Writers get writers. And not many other people do. So it is important, I believe, for us writers to share our experiences and emotions, to tell of our trials and our triumphs, and to speak our truths about the writing life. On the pages that follow, more than fifty writers share their personal stories about what it is to be, and what it means to be, a writer. Their testimonials remind me of a remark by Bernard Malamud, who, when he was asked what writing had meant to him, said, I’d be too moved to say. I am moved by the stories in A Cup of Comfort® for Writers. I trust you will be too.

~ Colleen Sell

Hummingbird’s Journey

Years ago, in the midst of dreaming of becoming a writer, seeing the shadow of my future writer-self outside my window, I entered a crisis.

An identity crisis.

A breakdown.

A depression.

A block.

There are many names in our culture for such experiences. Sometimes they come after a life change — a death, a divorce, a move. Sometimes they sneak up on us — we are driving merrily down our lane, and suddenly we see a stop sign from God.

Sometimes we stop. Other times we don’t, and then we get hit by oncoming traffic.

This was my stop sign: I was walking around my yard one fall morning, filling the bird feeders, and I thought, When I die, I don’t want to have lived my life as only a professor. A vision of my life stretched out before me: standing year after year in a windowless classroom with desks bolted to the floor in neat rows. I had been teaching at a small women’s college in the southeast, but like Georgia O’Keeffe, who taught there before me, I wanted more than that. I wanted to be a writer. I had dreamt of becoming a writer ever since childhood, and it was time, I decided, to make that dream come true.

At that moment, a hummingbird whizzed by me in the backyard, brushed past my shoulder, then stopped in mid-flight right in front of me, and looked at me. She chirped. I had begun the hummingbird’s journey.

I obeyed the stop sign, slowly. I did not run that day. I waited, responsibly, teaching dutifully until the end of the semester, and then I quit my job, and after the winter holidays, I left. I left my husband and stepdaughter to go to a two-week-long writers’ workshop in Mexico.

My teacher at the workshop was Pat Mora, a Chicana poet and storyteller. She was kind and grandmotherly, but in a sexy, laughing kind of way. On our first weekend in Mexico City, she led a group of students through the night streets of a festival, telling us about her childhood memories of El Paso and the Mayan, Spanish, and Catholic traditions that live on throughout eleven of the United States that only as recently as 1848 were part of the Mexican nation. I knew many of the facts of the history, but here it was, alive.

I’d sent samples of my poetry for her to read and evaluate ahead of time, and I desperately wanted her to like me. On the first night in our mountaintop hotel in Central Mexico, we sat together on a chocolate-brown couch in a large room with high wooden-beamed ceilings, and she said to me, If you spent as much time and effort on your poems as you have on your academic work, you could be a success.

I took it as an insult.

Poetry was about inspiration, I thought. Not work. It had more to do with mood and magic than research and revision, I thought.

I was wrong.

One afternoon near the end of the two-week workshop, I paid a local taxi driver to take me away. I wanted to go deeper into the forest — escape the mountaintop hotel and the students’ daily competition and nightly drinking and the small, nearby village with its American tourists circling for pottery and silver, cheap.

We drove south for hours, up and down and into the landscape. The taxi driver’s radio was on, and from time to time the Latin disco music would be interrupted by male American voices, DEA or CIA agents on planes, reporting back to base. We were not far from Chiapas.

Finally the driver stopped.

"Claro, vamos pués," he said, getting out of the car. I hesitated.

"Es lindo aqui. Vien." It’s pretty here. Come on.

I followed him, nervously. I was in the middle of nowhere. Anything could happen. But then, I told myself, that was true anywhere. I’d probably be in more danger in downtown Manhattan.

I thought about the Virgin of the Mountains regalo that hung from the taxi driver’s rearview window, and what he’d told me about his daughters, and how he said his wife’s pollo con molé was like poetry. Like heaven.

We walked through the brown valley of a Mayan ruin, dry winter air caressing our faces. We were quiet. All of a sudden, we came upon the sound of a trickling stream, and there they were: dozens of hummingbirds with wings of turquoise, rose, and blue, the colors of the Mexican mountains at sunrise. I had arrived at the hummingbirds’ winter place.

And in that place is found peace in the heart: being true to yourself, listening to your muses and using your own talents and following your own path, no matter how dusty, until you come upon your own water, your own food to get you through the winter, until the coming of spring.

Then comes another season in the life of the writer. There is growth enough in the garden, but no one comes to admire your colors, all you have begun to create and become.

This happened to me, a few years after the flight to Mexico. I had written many poems and essays, even had three books completed and had started submitting them for publication. But month after month, rejection after rejection came.

My writer friend, Greg, told me to think of publishing as a boomerang — just keep sending it away, and if it comes back, send it out again.

The problem was that one summer so many boomerangs came back that, before I could catch them, they hit me in the head.

So I took off, again. This time I piled my manuscripts into the trunk of my little Geo Metro and flew west across the continent upon its red wings.

I rushed through the swamps of Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana, and landed on the plains of Central Texas, where I finally took Pat Mora’s advice. I did original, archival research in Austin that would eventually lead to the publication of one of the manuscripts I carried. I followed the course of the Rio Grande, from its green bottom to its cactus mountain tips, visiting the homelands of some of my favorite Mexican American and Native American writers. I drove further west, and I walked and I learned about this land and its people and history, what cannot be found in most books, and what, I would later discover, would bring new depth to both my writing and teaching.

In northern New Mexico, I stopped to change the oil — I’d logged over 3,000 miles — and then headed to Ojo Caliente to drink and bathe and get massaged in its famous mineral springs.

It was on my second day there that I met Elizabeth, a grand smiling woman writer from Colorado, another hummingbird on a journey.

I was doing yoga poses in the water, and she asked me about them. I could tell from her eyes that she wanted to talk. I told her about my cross-country mission, my flight from publication rejection, and my attempt to be who I was trying to become.

Me, too, she said. During the school year, I teach high school English, but every summer I come here to rest and re-gather, and then go home again.

How do you do it? I asked her. She was twenty years my senior and had managed to hold together a marriage, a family, a home, a job, and the mind of a writer.

I come here, she answered. It’s good for me, and I return to my husband and son with a new appreciation. Then I take the summer to write, using all the ideas I’ve stored during the school year, so in the fall I can return to my students with renewed enthusiasm.

I nodded, slowly waving my arms in the warm water as I took in her words.

Later, dressed and dry in the parking lot as we said goodbye, I gave her a copy of one of my book manuscripts, with gratitude for the gift her story had given me, knowing that somehow I would make it — as a wife, mother, teacher, and writer. It was only a question of when.

It has been almost a decade since then. My stepdaughter will leave for college at the end of this summer, and my husband and I now have a lovely, six-year-old daughter too. I am still married. Still teaching. And I am, deep in my heart and on paper, a writer.

I have learned, on my hummingbird journeys, that my dreams about writing needed much more than inspiration or luck or the hope of a happy end.

I needed to discover how to balance hard work with the magic of language. How to push through each day with perseverance and discipline, and only occasionally give in to an outrageous urge or a whim. How to pay attention to my family and provide a steady, if small, income that nourishes us all daily. For in the end, I am human, not hummingbird, and I needed to learn how to integrate writing into my everyday life, not just get glimpses of it on cross-country journeys and fancies of flight with their potential dangers to life and limb.

Writers know well the energy that comes from these hummingbird journeys: the chance meeting that leads to opportunity, the block becoming breakthrough during a workshop, the long thoughts of the road that allow for a deeper understanding, or an idea for a project so profound that it puzzles us why we couldn’t have seen it all along.

The problem, when we are first beginning, is how to make it through daily life. It helps to think of hummingbirds staying still. They may hover in one place, but in order to do so, they beat their wings seventy times per second, using all of the energy of their tiny hearts to stay afloat, looking out with their iridescent eyes for the nearest trumpet flower or butterfly bush, something to dip their delicate tongues into so they can suck out the sweet nectar that will sustain them.

It’s hard work. Sometimes my heart beats as fast as a hummingbird’s as I hurry and try to stay focused and balanced and healthy so I can fit it all in: my writing, my teaching, my family, my friends. For as much as those early journeys inspired me, at a time when I needed the adventure and vision that long-distance travel can give, I have learned that there are smaller journeys that must be made in order to achieve true success:

To the bench outside my bedroom window where I sit, and write, and wait for dawn. To the grocery store and the garden, so I can find food for my family, something healthy to keep us grounded and strong. To my daughter’s school, where I volunteer to read stories and poetry about the fragile beauty of the earth. To the yoga studio, where I teach and take classes under the shade of a real tree, so I can slow down and breathe and get balanced. To the community college, where I teach students who barely made it through high school but still deserve the best education their small paychecks can afford. To my home, my heart, my husband, at the end of the day, where we laugh and talk and share stories of our daily journeys. To bed, where we love each other and provide a safe nest for ourselves and our daughters, so we can rest through the night and prepare for the next day. And to the land of dreams and prayers, where we remember we are part of something much greater than our solitary selves: this great world and her creator, who cares for us all, even the smallest hummingbird just beginning to make her own way.

~ Cassie Premo Steele

Groupie

I’ve never been much of a joiner, but after getting cancer, I found myself weighing the benefits of two different groups: a cancer support group and a writing group.

Bladder, colon, breast, lung, prostate, leukemia, multiple myeloma, kidney. Chemotherapy, hair loss, nausea, mouth sores, pain, neuropathy. As we went around the conference-room table and people gave updates on their cancer and treatment, the words ricocheted off the walls and each one seemed to jab at me. How did I end up in a room with all of these sick people? Oh yeah. That’s right. I’m in the Cancer Club now.

It was my turn. Everyone looked at me with encouraging eyes, as this was my first time at the meeting. I have a rare form of pancreatic cancer called islet cell cancer. I immediately launched into my quick disclaimer, intended to make people feel better about my diagnosis. It’s not the bad kind where you’re given six to twelve months to live; my oncologist says I could have seven years or more. My treatment is monthly injections, and I feel pretty well. Right then, though, my heart raced as though I’d just finished a 50-yard dash. Telling people that I had cancer still felt like a lie, like admitting to the worst kind of failure.

But I’d read that people who attend cancer support groups live longer than those who don’t. I needed as many tricks in my bag as possible, so I’d decided to give it a try. I had a history of failed attempts at joining groups, but here I was. Twenty men and women, mostly in their sixties and older, were at the Tuesday morning Living with Cancer support group. They all seemed to know each other and in casual conversation referred to the meeting simply as group. The term bugged me. Had I unwittingly become a groupie?

I felt like I had an open wound through which all my energy poured out as I listened to one after another describe their sicknesses and treatment in agonizing detail. My face must have shown my distress, because as I tried to slip out of the room after two excruciating hours, one of the cancer counselors caught up with me on my quick exodus to the elevator.

Lori, I’m so glad you could make it this morning, she said.

Well, thanks. I am too, I lied. I pushed the up button on the elevator.

We recommend that you come at least three times before you decide whether or not it’s a fit for you.

I was skeptical. But I did want to live longer, didn’t I? Okay, I said. I’ll see you next week.

Before the elevator had finished its short trip one floor up, images of my attempts to become a part of a group flashed through my mind like a slide show. There was my short-lived experiment with PAL softball the summer after fifth grade, when I discovered I didn’t really like running and that I preferred reading to swinging a bat. Quitting the Girl Scouts in the sixth grade was an act of rebellion; my radio had been confiscated at a camp-out in the local high school gym. It wasn’t that I was so into music at that time, but I was even less enamored with sleeping on a hard wooden floor. Then, in my junior year of high school, I tried out for and made letter girl, a secondtier cheerleader. It turned out I wasn’t all that cheery and was ready to quit after football season, but my best friend, Tami, also a letter girl, talked me into staying through basketball season, thus finishing the year. Even though other groups would tempt me with their promises, from high school on

Reviews

I was fortunate enough to win a copy of this book on The Writer Mama Blog that was signed by Lisa Romeo, one of the contributors.This is a very long anthology - over 300 pages - of essays on what it means to be a writer. This varies greatly depending on the voice and the background of each writer, and some of the stories are excellent. The main weakness in this book is that almost all the authors were women. I believe there were only two male authors at all. I suppose that points towards the gender who participates most in essay writing (and buys the resulting books), but I really would have liked to have seen a few more male authors to balance things.